Angelica shivered. She was freezing. It permeated her skin, dug deep into her bones. She reached for the blanket and found that she didn’t have one. She awoke with a start and sat up. Too quickly.

The table she lay on was metal. It absorbed the chill of the room and she nearly fell off as she tried to figure out where she was. She grasped the edges with frantic fingers, finding a thin, sharp-edged lip, and gingerly let go of it before she sliced her hand open.

A breeze was blowing from somewhere, a chill wind. Air conditioning. The clinic? She shuddered and then it dawned on her what she was wearing. More precisely, what she wasn’t. She was dressed in one of those paper gowns that patients wore at Stateside hospitals. They were a luxury item in the places where Meadowlark sent its doctors, but she was familiar with them from the years in residency. But then, they were not worn by doctors.

Yet it was the only thing she wore now, and as she moved the paper tried to slide down her shoulders. She pulled the ‘gown,’ as the medical community so blithely put it, back up and reached to tie the thing at her neck. But the ties had been snipped. A quick check as best she could by touch showed that they had all been snipped. Or torn off, given that everything was paper.

Feeling more than a little exposed she rose a bit more cautiously and, despite everything, she seemed steadier on her feet. She swung off the bench, trying to get over the feeling that she was mooning someone as yet unseen, and examined her location.

It looked like she was in a converted ICU. Not the clinic. She knew every room at the clinic. Here there were several windowed rooms in a circle, a nurses’ station in the middle. The rooms had been fitted with glass walls to facilitate observation, but the doors had been replaced with a heavy, thick door that might have come from an old U-Boat movie where they had to spin a wheel on the door to open it. There was no wheel on her side of the door. An airlock, her brain supplied helpfully, though for the life of her she couldn’t come up with a reason why one would need one.

The other rooms were refurbished the same way, though a few of the window walls were scratched up pretty badly, making the view beyond cloudy. Uncertain what she was supposed to be seeing beyond the glass she examined further, forgetting the fact that she herself was a ‘patient’ in this particular mad scientist’s lab, letting the analytical side herself come to the fore.

Something cloudy lay on the other side of one scratched pane. She wasn’t alone. Is that a foot? One foot, sticking out over the end of the bed. Her heart leapt into her throat. It had to be Taylor. He was too long for most beds, and that looked like his huge foot.

Oh, crap. Please, let that be his foot. Let him be here and not dead somewhere. Let him be alive.

“TAYLOR?” she called to him, but couldn’t determine if her voice could even carry to the other side of the glass.

He didn’t move.

The confrontation with Franco replayed in her mind. The gunshot. The blood on Taylor’s chest. The way he hadn’t been moving. She pounded the wall and yelled again. When he didn’t come she started calling for Franco. Anyone. Someone to hear her and come let her out, or at least check Taylor to make sure he’d transitioned to the cat and back in time.

He had, right? He’d saved himself. Like before, right?

But no one came.

Relax, relax. Deep breaths. Taylor is alive. They shot me with a sedative. They gave him the same thing. That blood... it was only from the impact. It wasn’t that much blood, was it? Not what I’m remembering. The brain exaggerates things sometimes.

But there were reactions to such things. It was possible that too high a dose was used, that he could have had his heart stopped by the chemical in the dart. That they killed him while he was out and stashed his body here with her because they had no better place to put it.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. If he were dead, they have a million places to stash a body. We’re in a freaking jungle!

Like that was reassuring.

She pounded the wall again, but the empty room stayed empty.

Whoever had done this had taken an empty ICU and turned it into a zoo. She was on display and there was nothing in the room with her but that metal table. No equipment, no hook-ups, no curtains. It was marble, she found when experimentally tapping the wall, and steel. Why would someone put steel plate on an ICU room?

There were large scratches in the metal, crisscrossing and overlapping. Similar marks were on the table, gouges in the metal.

She found three parallel lines and placed her hand over them. They almost matched her finger spread, though a little wider. She drew down, following the lines. She found three more, the same distance apart. They were all in groups of threes. The mark of a cat or cats that had tried to claw their way out of the room.

She turned to the glass walls on the rooms around her. They were riddled with scratches and claw marks, all in threes.

Her earlier assessment of calling the room a zoo wasn’t all that far off after all.

“Charra,” Angelica whispered. The entire tribe vanished. Mostly the females. Why? Males turned, too; if they wanted to watch the transition, they could watch either gender. What did the females have that was different? Okay, different in a way that would matter for this.

The idea that someone wanted to molest a lion was ludicrous, so why females? She spared a glance over to Taylor, or at least the foot she presumed to be his. Whatever it was they found in the female lions that kept them alive, please find it in him. But the question remained. If the females were mostly spared, what happened to the males?

She looked around further and saw a small red dome hanging from the ceiling. A camera? And was that still in use, or a holdover from when this place was a medical facility? There’d been an abandoned hospital in the city, she remembered. When the clinic had been set up, it had been decided too old for remodel, too far from the camp to be useful. But looking around the room, she wondered why they couldn’t have used it after all. Why, when someone had the money to rig out the room like this, couldn’t they have just restored the hospital completely to do some good instead of this...this evil.

She waved at the dome, risking the imminent loss of her paper gown. She only used one finger.

One of the hatches opened and she spun to face the sound. A woman in a nurse’s uniform walked out of the room, leaving it open. Angelica pounded on the glass. It was no one she knew from the clinic, and the woman paid no attention to her at all. She was tall and lean, with skin the color of night. Her black hair was tucked carefully into a knot at the top of her head and she carried a bottle, the kind that contained compressed air, with the ease of long practice. It was about as long as her forearm and thick around. It looked like the air bottles people with advanced emphysema carried around with them.

She walked to the wall next to Taylor’s room, set the bottle on a shelf, and hooked up a hose she pulled from the wall. Checking the readings on the bottle and the connection, she turned and left.

Angelica pounded on the glass with both fists and screamed, but the room remained stubbornly empty. The woman didn’t come back.

The foot next door moved and disappeared from view.

“TAYLOR!”

She heard a crash and muted swearing. Taylor stumbled against the glass, and her heart missed a beat. “Oh, thank goodness!” She plastered herself against the glass to get a better angle to see him. Was he shot, or had it only been the tranquilizer after all? The red plume hadn’t been blood at all, then, but merely the agent that delivered the tranquilizer.

“Angelica?” He seemed confused but seemed to have no visible injury. He wore a cloth hospital gown, which seemed terribly unfair until it occurred to her that the hospital gown he was wearing would have been washed with the same attention to cleanliness as any whites. In other words, the bleach that affected him so badly was in the weave of the only clothing he had on.

“Taylor, we’re in an old ICU.”

“In the clinic?”

“No. There’s no place like this in the clinic. I don’t know where this is. I think it’s the old hospital somewhere on the other side of the city. I’ve never been here before.”

He took a moment to digest that. “Have you seen anyone yet?”

“Yes, there was a nurse. She hooked up an oxygen tank to a hose outside your room.”

He lay his forehead on the glass. His skin was pasty, pale. “I don’t feel very well.” His speech was slurred. Angelica pressed against the glass.

“Look at me, Taylor.” She wanted to see his eyes, but he didn’t seem to understand what she wanted. How the hell was she supposed to diagnose what was wrong with him if he didn’t look at her? “Taylor!”

He made no reply but shook his head instead.

The door the nurse had disappeared through opened again. This time, though, the figure that appeared was familiar. Very familiar.

“That will soon pass; we needed a heavier dose of tranquilizer for you,” Dr. Melinda Johns said as she strode into the room. “Good morning, you two.” She smiled and set her coffee down on the nurses’ station. “Shall we begin?”

***

“MELINDA?” ANGELICA stumbled backwards against the table, and had to reach to steady herself. A numbness spread through her limbs, and she suddenly felt incredibly weary. “Melinda, what are you doing here?”

“Subject,” Taylor said, and his voice seemed incredibly far away. “Remember when we talked to her at dinner, she said her ‘subject’ died. Not her patient.”

“I suppose I should thank both of you.” Melinda smiled as she set down her clipboard, her gaze going from one to the other—calm, radiant. “I was very despondent last night. I was about to give up entirely, but you were able to help me see clearly. This is too important.”

“Melinda, what’re you doing?” Angelica’s voice wavered; she was in shock, she realized. Of all the people in the clinic, Melinda had been the last person she would have suspected. What about Manchester, then? Nothing fit anymore.

“You saw.” Melinda’s eyes lit with passion, the light you saw in the eyes of medical students before they became world-weary. Jaded. “You saw that girl, the one in the clinic with the contusions and broken bones. You saw her change, and you saw her heal!” She hissed that last word like an accusation. “Think of it! Instant healing! The complete restoration of injured limbs, with even the swelling and the pain—all gone.”

“It’s not a cure-all,” Taylor said, the words sharp and angry.

“So,” Melinda took a sip of her coffee and walked to the glass separating her from Taylor. “It’s true—you change, too.” Taylor said nothing. “I was told, but scarcely believed my luck. There are others like you, then, in America?”

Taylor crossed his arms. It should have looked ridiculous, the tall muscular man in a cotton hospital gown, probably open all the way down the back the way hers was, and he still came off as powerful. Dominant. He positively radiated anger.

Melinda only smiled and took another sip of her coffee. If it bothered her to be stared down, it certainly didn’t show on her face. Even the fatigue had lifted, and she seemed almost jubilant. “No comment? That’s all right. I’m sure we can resolve that bit of information in time. Tell me, is it true about you becoming a tiger? Not a lion?” She spun to face Angelica. “Can you believe this? Two separate genus of large cats? Are there others? Lynx or cheetahs? Cougars? Leopards?” Her eyes widened a little, and she put her palm against the glass as she leaned in to try and see Angelica’s responses better. “Really? Leopards? You must tell me where. Who? How did you find out?”

Angelica forced herself to remain steady, to not flinch under the scrutiny despite the fact that she felt very exposed being observed. If Taylor could hold his ground, then so could she. She found the strength to step forward, a single step, to take back that measure of power. “Melinda, this is—”

“What? Mad? Men and women are turning into furry beasts all around you and you’re looking for something sane? There is no order, no sense anymore.” Her eyes darted, her tongue came out to lick her lips. Her expression had shifted, the fatigue gone. She seemed crafty. Sly. “But we can learn from it. We can use that knowledge to save lives, ease suffering, cure diseases.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Taylor repeated, the anger still evident, coupled with something else. Tired. He was as tired of this whole thing as Angelica was. “It doesn’t cure cancer, it doesn’t cure diabetes.”

“Large cats are susceptible, Mr. Mann, to some similar ills as humans. I daresay that any sort of malady that would be held in common would, in fact, transmute with the change.” She turned and strolled back to the desk. “However, there are many ills which the two species do not share, and it is these that such a transformative process would eradicate.”

“Wait a minute. You’re trying to turn everyone into a shifter?” Angelica asked, glancing suddenly at Taylor, feeling the knot in the pit of her stomach intensify.

“Oh, good heavens, no.” Melinda shook her head. “No, I’m extracting the essence, the genome of the change itself. If I can reprogram that gene to create a method that would change things on the cellular level but still hold the human shape, it would be a simple matter of a single shot to cure and complete the worst of injuries. Think about it, a car crash that required years of physical therapy, countless operations, all erased in a single shot from a hypodermic.”

“That possibility has been very thoroughly analyzed,” Taylor said, leaning on his wall, shaking his head. “Do you understand me? It’s been DONE. There are those who have pursued research, who have actively been trying to isolate the healing qualities for years. IT DOESN’T WORK.”

“Interesting,” Melinda said, glancing at Angelica and ignoring Taylor’s meltdown completely, choosing to focus instead on the bit that obviously fascinated her the most. “There are those who research shape-shifting. I wouldn’t have guessed. I thought I was the first.” She finished her coffee and set the cup on the little shelf next to the oxygen bottle. “However, I think you’ll find that our little operation here is somewhat ahead of other research departments.”

“You’ve only been here a few years,” Angelica said. “You haven’t been at the clinic longer than that. And much as this is some setup you’ve got here, Doctor,” the word left a bitter taste in her mouth, “this isn’t a state-of-the-art facility. How could you have gotten so far ahead?”

“Because,” Taylor muttered from his own cell, “other facilities respect the lives they study and try to prevent needless death and suffering. She encourages it.” He brought a fist down on the glass, but it only made a dull thump.

“I do not!” Melinda flared. “I despise seeing someone in pain. My entire medical career has been dedicated to eradicating pain!” She reached up and lay her hands on her cheeks. “The screaming, the agony, they keep me awake at night. I can’t eat, I’m so nauseated. And I still hear them, each of them...” Her fingers had worked their way up into her hair and she gripped her scalp, pulling her hair as if she could shut out the noises that way.

Angelica had had enough of the dramatics. “Where is Charra?” she asked, coming all the way up to the glass, not caring anymore about her state of undress or anything else. “Tell me that much at least. What did you do with her?”

“Who?” Melinda’s face betrayed bewilderment at the question. She released her grip on her hair and looked at Angelica as if she’d started speaking a foreign language. “Who or what is a Charra?”

“The girl in the ER.” Angelica threw her hands up in frustration. “The one who came in with a plethora of broken bones that all went away because she’d changed.”

“The one you beat the hell out of,” Taylor growled.

Melinda shook her head. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not blaming that on me. That one was Batu. He did that. It was necessary, you see. If she was hurt enough, she would change. She managed to get away from me, though.” Melinda smiled and placed her hand on the heavy steel door. “I had these put in for future escape attempts. She was in no shape to break out, but her people got her free.”

“Her people?” Angelica shot a glance over to Taylor. A sudden hope clutched at her. Taylor shook his head slightly. Angelica bit her lip and clamped down on her excitement before Melinda noticed. Thankfully she was too caught up in herself.

“Yes. Sadly, none of the extractions or splices worked well at all. I had hoped that the females would carry the new gene into the reproductive organs, and thus breed a new species in which the lion was stronger and more feral.” She turned to Taylor. “No offense, but it’s the beast that holds the cure. The stronger the beast, the greater the healing.”

The door behind her opened suddenly. Angelica’s head came up. Someone was entering the room.

“Ah, Franco.” Melinda smiled. “Welcome back. I trust your report was a positive one?”

“My orders are to assist you in every way, Doctor,” Franco said, his voice flat and without emotion. “My superiors will be arriving in a day or two to evaluate your progress.”

“They’re coming here?” Melinda blinked in surprise. She turned to Angelica and studied her for a moment. Angelica had never felt so exposed in her life. The paper gown might as well have been see-through. “I see. I think, then, that we should be ready. If there is any success to be had, it should be within a few hours.”

“Melinda...” Angelica whispered, a sudden suspicion taking hold of her. “What did you do?”

“It occurred to me that I might have been doing this in a backward manner.” She walked over to Angelica’s wall and studied her through the glass. “I have been trying to separate the beast from the woman. It’s rather a primitive attempt, after all. But I have such lovely and so very expensive equipment, I wasn’t able to resist playing with it. Nor could you, I daresay. I’m still trying to isolate the sequence, but it’s time-consuming and so very hard to do when you’re also working a full-time job.”

“That’s why you’re tired all the time,” Angelica muttered. “Maybe you should try sleeping at night instead of...” She waved her hand to indicate the room, and the equipment beyond. “this.”

“Oh, please.” Melinda sighed. “I would kill for a good night’s sleep. Hell, I would take a good long nap at this point. It’s bad enough I’m going into surgery half-asleep, but then to have Manchester breathing down my neck...” She sighed, but a big smile creased her lips. “But one must make sacrifices for progress. Madame Curie gave her life for the discovery of radiation.” She paused a moment as she thought that through. “Though I’m sure she would have found another way if she’d known.”

Melinda took her coffee cup from the shelf and noted that it was empty. “I really do need to move that coffee pot in here, but I can’t stand it black and the refrigerator is in there.” She placed her hand on Franco’s arm. “Do you want anything?” she asked him, “There’s coffee and tea, since I’m going anyway.”

It was surreal, the polite civility when the woman was so obviously deranged. Angelica shook her head in disbelief and found it made her a little dizzy, so she steadied herself against the glass, her hand splayed open.

“No, thank you, Doctor.” Franco stood rigid, staring straight ahead.

“Keep an eye on her,” Melinda said, already halfway out the door. “Call me at once if there’s any change at all. I’m going to freshen up a little as well.”

“Change?” Taylor called. “What change? What are you talking about?” But Melinda was gone. “What is she talking about?” he demanded from Franco.

Franco calmly walked to his enclosure. “I don’t know,” Franco said, biting off each word. “I wanted you to kill Durand, yet you didn’t. You allowed him to live. Now, he’s gone. He escaped justice.” His face was a study in rage. “Now we cannot find him.” He shoved his hand into a pocket of his fatigues. “Had you killed him when you were supposed to, this could have been very different.” He pulled his hand free and held it, palm open to Taylor.

Taylor looked down at Franco’s hand. He started and looked back a Franco’s face. “Really? You think killing that fat pervert would have done shit? Fuck you!” Taylor shoved three fingers up in Franco’s face. Franco’s hand disappeared into his pocket.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Franco said, walking to Angelica’s enclosure. “But considering that your lives are in the balance, I suggest you cooperate. One does not always find a clean death here.” He turned to look at the unit the nurse had just left. “Sometimes it can be very unpleasant and very drawn out.” He shook his head and went to sit down at the desk. His hand disappeared under the counter.

“If she dies...” Taylor shouted.

“You don’t understand, Taylor Mann. It is not death Dr. Truman needs to fear. It’s being forced to continue living that should scare her and you also. There are connections here you do not understand. This place, this hospital, it’s owned and run by a private investor.”

“Are you serious?” Angelica asked. “That would take millions! Who?”

“I do not know. But my superiors are very interested in the outcome of the doctor’s work. My country is almost all jungle and savannah. If there is a way for a soldier to transform when injured, a way to heal instantly, or a way to stalk an enemy as...” He glanced at Taylor. “I found Batu.”

“Franco,” Taylor said, and Angelica could see the effort it took him to speak calmly. His face was flushed, pupils dilated. The man was furious and something had him scared “Why are you doing this?”

“I have my orders,” he said succinctly and shrugged. “I did not know that there was a trafficking ring surrounding these experiments. I did not know that the subjects were being tortured, but it would not have changed my actions. I am a soldier. I had my orders.”

“And you’re a damn good one,” Melinda said, reentering the room, coffee cup in hand. “Thank you, Franco.” Melinda took a sip. “Ah. Much better. Mr. Mann...” she said with a grin. “Ironic that name, isn’t it? I mean, since you technically aren’t human.” She went over to the bottle of gas and examined it. “I am sorry, I was told that you existed, but I’ve never had the opportunity to dissect a tiger. I’ve exclusively had lions. However, you seem to be responding to my bleach toxin.”

“Bleach?” Angelica echoed.

“Sure you’ve figured it out by now,” Melinda said, “pheromones from the lion shifters, added to the bleach. It’s a trigger warning, a way to spot possible shifters. If I can wave a white... well, anything, under their nose and see their reaction, it flags them as a possible match.”

“Then you beat the hell out of them, forcing them to confirm your suspicions.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary in your case, though, Mr. Mann. A reporter of your experience, I’m sure, you’ve managed to gain control over the change quite handily. However, I am curious...” She placed a wrench on the top of the bottle and twisted it, opening it. Angelica could hear the hissing of escaping gas.

“This is a concentrated, aerated form of the pheromones. For our lion subjects, most of whom were quite inexperienced, it induced the change nearly instantaneously. It should be interesting to note if it takes longer with you. Would you say that was due more to experience or to a distinct species?”

But Taylor wasn’t listening. His body twisted, and he grabbed his head and bent over, screaming. He hit the floor hard enough that Angelica could feel the shock through her feet.

“TAYLOR!” Angelica threw herself at the glass. But no matter how much she pounded, it didn’t break.